Surrealism ... is the forbidden flame of the proletariat embracing the insurrectional dawn--enabling us to rediscover at last the ...revolutionary moment: the radiance of the workers' councils as a life profoundly adored by those we love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley's poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life... is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Let the great soul incarnated in some woman's form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to service, and sweep c...hambers and scour floors, and its effulgent daybeams cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms; until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form, and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and head of all living nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded senses with wine and ...French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist w...hen the aesthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »